Looking Back for the Last Time
by Alotua
Summary: Toph's thoughts on the subject of home, set sometime shortly before Sozin's Comet. No pairings or plot really, just internal musings from Toph's POV, done as a sort of characterization exercise.


I haven't had a home for a very long time.

My parents never understood me, from a very young age I new this. I ran away for the first time when I was four. Four. That first time was only a short attempt, lasted all of five minutes, maybe. It was when I met the Badgermoles for the first time though, when I learned bending from them, that the gap between me and my parents was really cemented. It was always tough, being a blind girl; my parents were distant to begin with, but they just didn't know what to do with me, with my disability. But it was only after I began bending that I realized that there was a world beyond my parents and that I might actually have a stake in it.

It was lucky for me that I could sense the earth the way I did, and lucky for me that I encountered the Badgermoles. My first memory is of standing barefoot in the yard, sensing a connection with the earth, of not knowing a name for that affinity, just knowing that it was a part of me and I a part of it. And then when I met the Badgermoles at six, after another attempt at running away from home, I knew then what that affinity was—They taught me, showed me, with out vision or words, how to access that instinctive connection I felt with the earth, how to harness it.

I've always been really good at running away. I suppose it helps that I've never really felt at home anywhere.

Even with Twinkle-toes and the Sugar Queen, we may have overcome our rough start but I was always a fourth wheel with them. I hung on to them so hard, forced myself to act nonchalant, even when I felt so isolated from them and didn't know what to do—I hadn't ever had real interactions with people outside of my eggshell pretense of a family life or my secret stage life in the rumble ring—I hung on to twinkle-toes and the others so hard because I didn't have any other place to go.

In a way we were all like that; the air nomads all one hundred years dead, the Water Tribe splintered and endangered by the Fire Nation, and, later, an exiled fire nation prince who had snubbed the one real family member he had left. But Aang had at least grown up with a monk who loved him, although I grant that his situation is far more messed up than mine (but then again, he also does have a rather friendlier personality than me. Admittedly, I'm not the easiest person to get along with). And Katara and Sokka do have a home and a family that will, if things go smoothly, have a chance to reunite at the end of all this mess. As for Zuko, he also has a pretty crap situation, but he at least always had a home in Uncle.

Am I jealous? Probably. Sugar Queen would tell me that my parents love me, but the simple truth is that they don't. Maybe it is true that they love their daughter, but they don't love who I really am, they don't love me. And maybe that's partly my fault for on one level trying to conform with the docile blind girl daughter that they wanted and developing a different persona behind their backs. The second I showed them the girl that I had become they flat out rejected me. They wanted to cage me and try to somehow force me to be the docile little blind girl again. But that isn't me. That was never me. And maybe if I had given them time they would have come to terms with who I really am, but that's not something I can really believe in, no matter how nice a fairy tail it might make for people like Sugar Queen.

I ran away for the first time at age four. It wasn't just for shits and giggles; my parents never understood me, never as in from the moment I was born. Poppy and Loa Bei Fong tried for a long time to have children, and then finally they had me. Imagine their disappointment when they found out that the child they had tried so hard to produce was defective. They told people that I had been stillborn. Outwardly they grieved for their loss, more so when the healers gave them the bad news that Poppy would be bearing no more children. And behind the public farce of mourning they quietly shuffled me off on to wet nurses and nannies. Eventually they grew found of their little disabled girl, or at least enough so to surround her with guards and to shelter her from even so much as a stubbed toe. After all, such a helpless dear little thing has some charm and appeal to even the least nurturing.

But the knowledge that they declared me dead at birth does give a slightly different perspective to the fact that they didn't want me wandering the grounds, where someone might see me, doesn't it?

Sugar Queen thinks I'm being unreasonable when it comes to my parents. Maybe I am. It's true that I don't know a whole lot about the world other that what I've seen on this trip, so maybe I don't know much about what a decent family really looks like. Maybe I am just bitter over past imagined slights. It would certainly hurt a whole lot less if that were so. But even if it is all just in my mind, that doesn't change the fact that I feel so lost, so homeless. It's not right for an earth bender to be without roots like this; I love the earth and I love the Badgermoles, but there isn't a single place in the Earth Kingdom or beyond that I would call home.

I've always been really good at running away, but what exactly is it that I'm running away from if I don't have a home?


End file.
